Environment : Environmental Information Systems

Integrated Management of Corporate Environmental Information

In order to implement the PDCA cycle for environmental sustainability management, it is essential to collect a significant amount of environmental performance data on energy, waste, chemical substances, and water, etc. at each business site in a prompt and accurate manner.

Panasonic has built and introduced an environmental performance system, the Eco System (Factory), to globally collect and manage environmental data from all of our business sites. With this system, monthly CO2 emissions are managed in particular, allowing checking the progress of initiatives and identifying issues. The system plays an important role in achieving the reduction of CO2 emissions by sharing the information and taking measures.

The Eco System (Factory) is also functioning as a scheme for sharing information on the status of compliance among sites across the world. In the event of complaints from local community residents or when a specific value exceeds ordinance-regulated levels, the person in charge at the business site enters such data, which is instantaneously e-mailed to relevant persons at the Company and the Head Office. This enables swift information-sharing and appropriate action.

As for products, legislation relating to chemical substances in products are becoming more stringent, and communication and disclosure of information in the supply chain are mandatory under the REACH Regulation.

Panasonic has developed and implements its own product chemical substance management system, which is compatible with industry standards for information disclosure in this area. Through this system, we gather information from about 10,000 suppliers of components and materials for our products, both in and outside Japan, and promptly respond to investigation requests by customers concerning the chemical substances used in our products.

In addition, we renewed the product chemical substances management system in January 2017 to respond to the introduction of chemSHERPA, the new format for information communication introduced under the initiative of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. At the same time, the system has been modified to adapt to the wide range of products (including automotive equipment) in step with the expansion of our businesses as well as to comply with laws and regulations that have grown in complexity in coordination with product design databases.

*1 Joint Article Management Promotion Consortium. *2 New information communication format developed under the initiative of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry *3 Standard research format for the automotive industry

Also, we aim to cut down CO2 emissions during product use by improving the energy-saving performance of our products. For this reason, the Eco System (Product) is used to globally assess the size of contribution in reducing CO2 emissions by linking product performance data such as annual power consumption for each product category with other data such as sales volume and CO2 emission factors in each region.